


My Life Is in the Falling Leaf

by DarlaBlack



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Episode: s08e14 This is Not Happening, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Pregnant Sex, Season/Series 08
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-03
Updated: 2018-06-03
Packaged: 2019-05-17 13:44:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14833376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DarlaBlack/pseuds/DarlaBlack
Summary: What difference would five minutes have made?





	My Life Is in the Falling Leaf

**Author's Note:**

> I’m sure something like this has already been written, but here’s my go at it. Following the actual logic of the earth’s turning and normal human pregnancies, this story sets Mulder’s abduction in late May/early June, and the events of TINH in September. Assuming William’s conception in "all things" (April), Scully is about five months pregnant.

_+_

 

Doggett tried to hold her back, but she would not be restrained. Mulder’s pull on her was like gravity, stronger even. His heartstring, tethered to hers yet in his state of almost-death, lured her, helpless, across the rock-strewn copse. She fell heedless to her knees at his side, fingers madly groping at his too-cold skin.

“Oh God, Mulder. You need help.” Two fingers grazed his jugular, but she would not hear their report “He needs help!” she screamed. Others around her shook their heads in sympathy. Her eyes were a desperate blue. When she saw that they would not move at her command, she moved herself. “Help him get warm,” she scolded, levering herself up and back toward the main house. 

She was a whirlwind, gone again across the field before the others could respond. Doggett, knocked back by the force of her determination, came slow to action.

“Get some more blankets,” he said, hustling the others, humoring his broken partner in this terrible hour.

Scully had never run so fast or so hard, her feet barely touching, much less pounding, the rocky earth. “Where is he?” Back in the house she scrambled to the room where she’d left the only man who could save her. He was waiting. “Please,” she said. “Please, he needs help.”

The man nodded, and they left the house together. Jeremiah Smith jogged with her back again through the trees where Mulder lay, a gray mass among the scrub, his hair spiking out from under frayed wool. The man Smith knelt beside him, pressed one hand against Mulder’s temple and lowered the other over his unbeating heart. Scully was a statue beside him, pinching her lower lip between two fingers until it was numb, eyes like beryl glass.

A moment later, a flash of light erupted against the horizon. A warbling sound followed, then a sense of trembling in the air.

“No!” Scully shouted. She leapt at Smith, at Mulder, determined to hold them here, to pin them on terra firma. The warbling intensified, vibrating in pulses that rattled zippers on jackets and shook nickels in the pockets of the dumbfounded agents who watched with mouths agape. She would not let him go. Not ever. They would have to take her, too.

But she was as powerless now against this force as she had been in Bellefleur; the light shook her grip on Smith, and the trembling air pushed her back. Her urgent fingers seized at Mulder, blindly tugging at his shoulder, his hip. “Mulder,” she whimpered into the drowning clamor.

The torrent of sound and light seemed to draw out time and space, thin and high-pitched, into a world-flattening thrum. And then the undulating tremor loosened. The blue-bright glare tore across the terrain once more and was gone. Agents stumbled in confusion. Doggett rushed toward Scully, whose eyes were still squinted shut. But under her fingers, a solid hip-bone, a smooth-skinned clavicle. He was still here. She pulled herself to him through the dirt.

“Agent Scully, you alright?”

She ignored him.

“Mulder,” she whispered. The scars on his face were barely visible, but the colorless moonlight obscured his complexion. Jeremiah Smith was gone; her hands found the spots where the other man’s had been, seeking signs of life. Whether it were her own beating heart passing warmth to his skin or his own, she felt a heat beneath her fingers. Quickly, two digits at his jawline disclosed a steady pulse. “Oh, Mulder.” Her head came down on his chest in shattering relief.

Behind her, Doggett paced. “Where’s Smith?” he demanded. Monica had joined him with firecracker eyes.

“Did you see it?”

“Of course I saw it. Musta been some kind of helicopter. Where the hell is Smith?”

She shook her head, still high on the encounter. “Gone,” she said, all wonder, until her attention found the pair that was huddled in the dirt. She moved slowly to crouch on the other side of Mulder’s body.

“Dana,” she said, reaching a tentative hand out to Scully’s back. Red hair shifted and Scully’s eyes met the other woman’s, though she refused to lift her cheek from Mulder’s chest.

“He’s alive,” she murmured. 

Monica’s heart broke a little, and she opened her mouth to speak, but found that she could not. The look in Scully’s eyes was so certain, so full of hope (and agonizing denial). She was about to call John back over to help her with Scully, who showed no inclination toward separation from the corpse of her partner. But then a motion beneath the blankets made her jump back.

“Jesus,” Reyes said. A hand shifted from under the coverings, pliable fingers twitching against scrub grass. His head moved too, a slue toward his partner.

Scully’s head lifted and her eyes locked on his face. “Mulder,” she murmured. Her palm came against his cheek. A tear fell from her overflowing eye onto his naked shoulder. Slowly, the hand that had spilled from the blanket lifted to her wrist, and a smile, brighter than the UFO, broke across Scully’s face. His heavy eyes opened to it as if to sunrise. 

“Hi, stranger,” she said, making the sides of his mouth flitter up.

“Hey.”

A ruckus was stirring behind them as Reyes called for a paramedic, and SWAT agents scrambled to figure out what, exactly, had happened. But there in the grass of the forest floor were Mulder and Scully, alone in the world, eyes coupled against the cosmic maelstrom that thrust their ship against the wind and water but could not sink it.

 

_+_

  

She clung to him as he was piled on the stretcher and maneuvered into the ambulance. His body was healing before her eyes, the scars and wounds disappearing into the ether and confusing the hell out of the paramedics. He held her palm against his lips and kissed it. She would not let her fingers leave his body, nor her eyes his face. He read the torment she had suffered, there in her eyes, but had not yet remembered his own. He could answer no questions yet about what had been done to him.

“How long?” His voice was a low susurration that trembled her insides. He fingered the longish strands of her hair, trying to guess by its growth. Her face, too, seemed rounder.

“Three months,” she said. His eyes fell into a wince. “But you’re here,” she said. “You’re alive.” A quick squeeze of his shoulder and his eyes relaxed.

The rest of the long ride to the hospital was quiet.

 

_+_

 

Two days later, he was deemed plane-worthy, but in need of counseling. He’d met with Skinner, Doggett, Reyes in the hospital and told them all the same: that he remembered nothing but darkness and agony, faceless forms and screaming Scully’s name when he had anything like a voice to scream with. Doggett threw his arms up in defeat, at a loss for anything like a rational explanation. But the fact that there were more than ten FBI witnesses meant that even Kersh couldn’t ignore what all the reports would say. The small hospital in Helena had done all they could do for Mulder, so he was summarily dismissed.

Scully had, out of sheer and desperate hope, packed his badge and clothes in her carry-on. He stood before her now, himself utterly, in jeans and a v-neck sweater, accessorized by a smirk and a side of smartass.

“Hey, G-woman. You ready to go?”

She nodded, handed him a bag to carry, and they left his hospital room together.

He had of course noticed the altered shape of her body, but had not deduced its cause. Stress eating maybe, he thought, and not his place to say anything. Her fullness stirred something primal and unconscious inside him, though, driving his hand to the small of her back, the curve of her cheek, even more so than usual. Before they’d left his room, he’d pulled her flush against him and kissed her soundly until her face was pinked with want. She was holding the secret against her heart, waiting for him to be ready—for herself to be ready. If he managed to get her naked before she worked up the courage to tell him, he would know for sure, she thought. It wouldn’t take much. She was frantically hot with relief and reunion, not to mention second-trimester pregnancy hormones. She’d wanted to strip him naked and push him back onto his hospital bed after one kiss, near-death experiences or no.

On the plane he quizzed her on the events of the past months; some she knew, some she didn’t. Cases (yes), sports (no), and pop culture (not really) were on the top of his list. She’d heard the new X-Men movie was good and suggested they could rent it. He cared less about political gossip and Bureau rumors, but she filled him in on what she could. It was small talk, but it seemed to help him refocus. She skipped some of the dodgier recent case details: that slug thing, for one.

“You’re really feeling okay?” she asked, performing her standard hair-stroking  _cum_  medical-probing.

He pulled her hand from his hair and kissed it. “I feel good, Scully. Really.”

She thought he seemed himself, but worried that a too-quickly-healed body might belie a deeper trauma. She watched for signs and meanwhile enjoyed the familiar clasp of his fingers, entwined with hers and resting between their seats.

 

_+_

 

His apartment looked the same but he sensed something different. It smelled like her, now. A few foreign objects—her things—dotted his otherwise familiar landscape: a small pile of paperbacks, a sweater, hand lotion. Standing in his foyer, facing his small living room, he angled his head at her, a little disoriented, mostly curious.

“I kept your fish company,” she confessed.

He smiled.

Silence dilated into every available space, save the burbling fish tank. Scully wondered if she should go home, let him settle in, even if it were the last thing she wanted. As was custom, she buffered the awkwardness with work.

“Skinner said you should come in on Monday to get all your paperwork settled.” She set the duffel bag down and dropped onto his couch. He followed and sat beside her, knee-to-knee.

“What about this Doggett guy?”

She looked at him and shrugged. “He’s a good agent, but my guess is he’ll be happy to hand back the X-Files.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

She sighed. “I don’t know.”

“You guys worked well together?”

His mask was good, but she saw through it; she gave him a look. “Mulder—“

His hands went up in defense. “Just asking.”

She pursed her lips and thought for a moment. “It was frustrating, sometimes. He didn’t want to believe what happened to you, or in anything else outside the accepted parameters of earthly possibility.” Here she gave him the smallest smirk. “I had to try on your shoes for a bit, Mulder. It was weird.”

“How’d they fit?”

She thought again, remembering the cognitive dissonance of humoring, suggesting even, a paranormal explanation. “It was hard to walk. But it made me feel closer to you.”

He nodded, rapped her knee with his knuckle. “Weird is good.”

A lingering regard unfolded between them, and suddenly the room felt warm. She was wearing a loose jacket, buttoned, to cover what was becoming increasingly obvious. But it was September in D.C., not Montana, and this tension was all too much. She felt her cheeks reddening. She needed to tell him. He deserved to know.

Before she could germinate the courage to begin her confession, though, he leaned in, palming the back of her hair and pulling her lips to his. The current between them buzzed to quick-cycling life. Her mouth opened, tongue at the ready, and their kiss melted them together as if they’d spent not a day apart. His hand traveled down her neck to her swollen breast, and he made a sound in the back of his throat at its heaviness.

She pulled back, shocked at her want, but needing to tell him before he figured it out on his own.

“Scully,” he said. “Something’s different.”

Cheeks aflame again, she looked down at her lap. There was fear, but also the tiniest of smiles at the corner of her mouth. “Yes.”

Mulder hooked his index finger against her jaw and tilted her face to look at him. “What is it?”

A heavy breath shuddered in and out of her lungs. “Do you remember,” she began, “that I wasn’t feeling well the week we were in Oregon? The week you left?”

“Yeah,” he said. His panic face was rapidly settling into his features.

She swallowed hard. “I, um…” The words sat in her throat. She couldn’t make them come out.

“Scully, don’t make me guess.”

Her eyes found his, and there she found her courage; she was all-of-a-sudden excited to tell him, as she had been in the first minutes she’d heard the news herself. Another smile broke across her lips. “Mulder, do you also remember the intensely passionate sex we were having on a regular basis for most of the past fifteen months, barring personal injury, petty squabble, or traumatic separation?”

At this he laughed and dropped his forehead against hers. “Yeah, I remember that pretty well.”

Scully took the opportunity, their lips now being so near, to snatch his mouth against hers. For courage. She delivered her best kiss, as if to remind him what those months had been like, while she took his right hand in hers and slipped it beneath her blazer, against her firm, expanded abdomen. He must have felt the evidence of her gravidity, and she knew he understood when he stopped kissing her back. She pulled away to look at him, found his expression somewhere between panic again and awe.

“What?” His fingers twitched against her.

“I’m pregnant,” she said.

“But that…” He shook his head. “It wasn’t the IVF.”

“No.”

The panic gave way to curiosity. “Us, then?”

“Just us.”

“But how?”

Here she had fewer answers. “I don’t know. Except that my infertility may not have been as complete as we thought.”

“Your miracle,” he said.

“And yours.” She looked him in the eye, wanting him as certain as she was.

“Scully, I—“ Suddenly it was too much. He pulled his hand away and stood. “Did you know?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “I found out literally minutes before I knew you were gone. I never would have—“  _let you go_ , she thought. “I would have told you.”

His eyes were closed, his fingers at his temples. It was probably too much, too soon, she thought. He’d hardly had time to think about what happened to him. She could see the crush of thoughts pouring through him, written on his face.

“I’m sorry, Mulder, I shouldn’t—“ She sighed and stood to face him, placed a comforting hand on his arm. “I needed you to know, but I want you to take some time.”

“Time?” He was looking at her in confusion.

“I just mean… Mulder…”

“What will we do?”

She paused, mouth open. “What do you mean?”

He didn’t even know; he had so many questions. He thought back to Oregon, to her pale face in his doorway, shivering on that chilly evening. To her holding a baby on her lap and how his heart had broken. But God, if they’d known… she was pregnant even then, while he ached for the child he thought they would never have—a little piece of them had already taken hold, all on its own. He was ready to quit for her right there in that moment, to throw it all away and whisk her toward some more comfortable life. Was that still true, even now after what he’d been through? How many times had he made love to her, unknowing, since whichever miraculous time created this future child? Had her body already been changing beneath his fingers? And here she’d been since, all on her own, chasing monsters in the dark, risking her life, working with  _someone else_. He suddenly felt woozy.

“I need to lie down,” he said, stumbling toward his bedroom. The sheets were rumpled; a shirt that smelled like her was balled between the pillows. He collapsed against it, his face in the scent of her, and passed out.

Scully stood in his living room, her mouth still hanging open. She wasn’t sure if she should laugh, cry, or go home. Instead, she followed him into the bedroom and checked his pulse, his temperature, with her right hand. Satisfied that he’d just been overwhelmed and exhausted, she pulled his shoes off his feet, stripped her own shoes and jacket, and curled up beside him in the bed. Within minutes, she slept.

 

_+_

 

Scully awoke to a pleasant sensation in the dark: heavy warmth against her side and a smoothing caress circling her belly. The atmosphere had shifted and settled between them, though their dozing had been brief—she could feel it, a kind of relaxed pleasure. It was the grateful embrace of another near-miss, which they had endured so many times before; only now she sensed something sweeter as well: a tentative opening toward some better future. It was rather like hope, maybe, with all its attendant vulnerabilities. Mulder was holding her flush against his chest, with a gentle hand over the soft swell where their someday-child waited. He must have sensed her come awake; he spoke softly into her hair. “When did it happen?” He asked. She closed her fingers over the hand on her middle, holding it there, wishing he could feel the same internal flutters that she could. She wondered how long he’d been waiting here for her to waken, thinking, coming to terms.

“April 13,” she said.

“You know the exact date?” Incredulity.

She chuckled into his shoulder. “It can be easy if you’re tracking cycles. I never stopped after the IVF.”

“So what happened on April 13?”

He felt her smile against his bicep where her nose tickled the invisible hairs on his skin. ”You came back from England.”

“England,” he said. Ah, realization. “And we talked about fate.”

“And somehow I ovulated.”

“And we made a baby.”

“Mmm,” she murmured against him. “We did.”

He thought for a moment of the years they’d spent trying—first one way, then another. “Why didn’t it happen before, do you think? After all that—“

“Hot steamy sex?”

“Time,” he said. “Jesus, Scully.”

She laughed again, giddy with the presence of him, the relief of his solid form pressed to hers, and the delicious smell of his long-worn t-shirt under her cheek.

“And yes, after all that hot, steamy sex,” at this, he pushed a denim-clad knee between her legs and she pushed her ass against it with a small keen of pleasure.

“Even—hmm…” his distracting fingers, tucking beneath her waistband—“even healthy fertile couples can take up to a year to conceive.”

“Oh,” he said. “Do you think it was—“ a kiss on her ear— “the potent intensity of my lovemaking that woke up your ovaries?” An open-mouthed kiss on her neck.

“Ah… maybe,” she said, leaning into his kiss. “Or maybe that spaceship in Africa.”

“Ohhh, Scully. You just said spaceship. I’m gonna need a minute.”

Her laugh was that glorious eruption of giggles she usually tried to hold back. He turned her so they were face-to-face on the pillow and he was met with the blue-eyed splendor of her smile. He pushed her hair away from her face and felt suddenly apologetic, serious.

“I’m sorry I freaked out and fell asleep, Scully.”

She shook her head and rubbed his stubbly cheek. “I’m sorry I had to shock you with the news. You’ve got a lot to process right now.”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’m fine.”

“Are you? Mulder, what you went through—I can’t even imagine what you must be feeling. It was so much worse than…“ Than what? Than what she’d been through? Than what she’d been expecting?

“Look at me, Scully. I’m okay.”

“I’m not talking about your body.” Her voice was firm now, worried. “The things they did, Mulder, how could anyone endure three months of—“ her voice broke off. She couldn’t bear to think of it.

He was shaking his head.

“And  _why_ ,” she added. “Why would they do those things to you? To anyone?”

“First, Scully, I’m not sure it was three months for me. I think time might have been  _different_ , wherever I was. And second,” he said, “I think the… the abuse, was a kind of test itself.”

“What do you mean? What kind of test?”

“I can’t remember everything, but it seemed to me that they were testing my ability to heal.”

“To heal? But then why—“ She couldn’t say it.  _Why kill you_. Maybe they hadn’t expected him to die. Maybe he’d failed whatever test he’d been given.

“Whatever their reasoning, whatever the plan,” he said, his voice tender, “we’ll figure it out. But not now.”

“But Mulder…” she could hardly bring herself to say it—needed to say it anyway. She swallowed hard. “You were dead when we found you.” It was a whisper in the dark, almost not there at all.

His mouth opened, and at first no words came out. He’d known it was bad, but he hadn’t known quite how bad. He thought of how she must have felt in those first minutes, before she’d brought Smith to save him. He thought of how things might have been if she hadn’t. His eyes locked hard and fierce on hers. He pulled her to him and brought his lips to hers once, quickly. “Then help me feel alive,” He said. His voice was like molten gravel.

Her defenses were useless: she’d been too long without him, and they both needed this. Her thumb rubbed the pulse-point of his wrist while her eyes searched his face. Finally, she nodded and moved his hand under her top. Their lips connected again, and she did not resist, but let her own hands trace the so-familiar skin of his biceps, then his abdomen, beneath his shirt.

Soon, they were on fire with each other; the heat inside her demanded release and she grasped at the hems of their clothing, desperate for the relief of skin on skin. His flesh was marked with familiar scars, beautifully healed, each with a secret history. But it was also, like hers, warm and thrumming with life. She was naked but for her underwear and the crush of her sensitive breasts against his chest delivered a relentless sweetness. His hand traced the curve of her waist, her hip, then slid beneath her sole scrap of fabric to grip her ass. It traveled down, down around the curve until he encountered drenched cloth and an unfathomable wetness. He groaned against her neck.

“Good God, woman. How is that even possible?” She was licking the hollow at his throat and slipping her own curious fingers beneath his boxers, tugging them down, bumping her wrist against his straining steel-and-silk erection.

“Increased blood volume during pregnancy makes everything a bit more—ohh, yes—intense.” She writhed against the finger he had slipped inside her from behind and shoved his boxers the rest of the way down and off with her toes. Ah, Scully, he thought. A scientific explanation for even this. His mouth crushed against hers, tongue mimicking the movements of his finger and steeped in a similar degree of wet. Her right leg, bent at the knee, slinked up and over his hip, deepening the reach of his inspecting hand. “Mmm, Mulder do you know how badly I’ve wanted this?” Since her fourth month, she’d barely gone two days without touching herself, thinking of him, crying after. This was so much better.

He broke their frenzied contact only to turn on a bedside lamp. “I want to see you,” he said. She flushed and obliged his request, rolling onto her back to reveal her shape. She was pinked and pregnant, wild hair all a-tumble over his rumpled bedding.

“God, Scully.” He gaped at the small, hard mound of her belly, the fullness of her breasts, the unmistakable flush of her cheeks and the want in her eyes. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. He was iron-hard above her, but his touch was soft as he traced with his fingers the changes he’d finally caught with his eyes. Soon his hands were not enough, so he dipped his mouth to taste, tonguing her darkened nipples until she moaned into his hair. Her fingernails traced gentle circles around his scapula and spine until his mouth dragged lower and they found his temples, the sides of his cheeks.

His lips landed on the soft swell above her underwear, where he placed a lingering kiss just at her navel. She felt like some goddess of fertility under his touch, ripe and round, overflowing with life. She was swollen and ready and aching below him.

“Mulder,” she rasped.

He looked up at her, eyes hooded with desire, his chin pressed against dampening lace.  “Scully,” he whispered back.

“I need you inside me. Right now.”

He nodded. “Okay.”

He stripped the lacy fabric down her legs and tossed it aside, allowing himself a quick kiss against her throbbing center, deft enough to make her buck beneath him, on his way back up her body. He hovered over her, ready, but was suddenly doubtful.

She saw what he meant—the arc of her abdomen produced an unfamiliar obstacle. Quick-thinking, she pushed him onto his side, swiveling her own body slightly so their torsos made an acute V. She hooked a leg over his hips and he was suddenly there against her entrance. They locked eyes across the sheets. She cupped his jaw with one hand, while the other guided him inside her, and it was like the world had suddenly come together again, all its puzzle pieces aligning and clicking back into place. She was full with him. They were full with each other.

He moved slowly at first, reacquainting himself with her body. With every thrust, she arched her back and her impossible, perfect belly rose into the air. He was mesmerized. She was abundant, filled and glowing, as she’d never been before.

They came shuddering together in the amber light of a regained future, fortified against the onslaught around them, armored and battle-ready in each other’s unwavering grasp. Elsewhere on the earth, the sun broke the horizon and carried with it the demands of an unspoiled day. But here two bodies took their respite, brimming with promise in the pre-dawn hour.

  

\-----

 

 **End Note** : I’m not sure how this turned so tooth-achingly sweet at the end. I guess I lost my capacity for angst when I got excited about them finally having really hot pregnant-sex. They deserved it. The title comes from Christina Rossetti’s poem, “A Better Resurrection,” which is probably a little too on-the-nose, but what can I say? I'm really bad at titles.

tumblr: spookydarlablack


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